AMERICA’S CUP UPDATE : NOTEBOOK : Conner Might Reconfigure Plans for Reconfiguration
If all this secret-keel talk seems above the head of the your Average Joe, take heart. The experts don’t have all the answers, either.
After the debut of Stars & Stripes radical keel and rudder system flopped against Bill Koch’s America 3 and little sister Defiant--twice--Koch suggested Dennis Conner’s camp go back to the system it used in Round 1 of the defender trials, to be more competitive for the second half of Round 2.
And imagine that. It worked.
“The keel change made a big difference,” said John Bertrand, Thursday’s skipper. “We were pleased to be able to change it back.”
Stars & Stripes defeated Defiant for the first time Thursday, putting doubt, if not a crimp, into the syndicates upcoming reconfiguration plans.
“We had a plans for our January configurations, for our February configurations, and March configurations,” tactician Tom Whidden said. “We never expected that halfway through the February series we’d have to return to our January configurations. So, we still on plan to do the changes we were planning for March anyway, so we’ll stick to that plan.”
No word on what those March configurations might be. But Whidden alluded to the fact that the radical system won’t necessarily be back. In fact, it might be too far ahead of its time. When, then, might we see it again?
“1995,” Whidden said.
Tatsumitsu Yamasaki is chairman of the Nippon Challenge, as well as S&B; Shokuhin Co., Ltd.
Shokuhin produces spices, not cars, but Yamasaki is concerned.
“There are many misunderstandings and miscommunications in the current economic situation,” he said Thursday. “One of the reasons we’re doing this is to redirect all that and to concentrate 100% on sport.
“It would be very wrong if we win the Cup to see it as another target for bashing Japan, as if we were taking over another part of the United States. That would be very narrow thinking.”
Instead, Yamasaki said, the Cup should be celebrated as a blending of cultures.
“When you see the other teams going out on the race course with sandwiches for lunch, and you see our team with rice bowls for lunch, you can see there is a difference in cultures.”
The point is, Yamasaki meant, that even skipper Chris Dickson and his New Zealand mates partake of rice on the Japanese boat.
Doubts persist whether Dickson’s Japanese crew, which has little world-class racing experience, is up to competing in the Cup, despite three years of hard training.
“I’m supremely confident in my crew,” Dickson said. “My crew stands up to every challenge I’ve thrown at them.
“They stood up when two other crews we raced against did not. The French crew (which sailed over its gennaker) did not, and the Italian crew (which sailed for the wrong mark) did not.”
The second round of the Louis Vuitton Cup challenger trials starts Saturday, and Nippon joined most of the others in making various modifications since the first round, when it was 6-1.
The trend seems to be to retreat from the radical back toward the conservative, especially with strange keels and forward rudders, which haven’t worked out. Theories are being separated from sailing.
“The wind tunnels and towing tanks (for scale models) don’t tell you the whole story,” Dickson said. “The big tank out there off Point Loma is what counts.”
Pascal Apicella is remembered as the driver of the French work tender who last month rescued three private boaters whose craft was about to wash onto the rocks off Point Loma.
This week Apicella received his reward. He was guest of honor when Le Defi Francais christened its new 65-foot tender, Champs Elysees, at Mission Bay.
Tender drivers from the New Zealand, Spanish and both Australian syndicates also attended. Despite rain, the crew gave up part of a day off to come down to the compound for the occasion. Wives and girlfriends rewrote the lyrics of a French song praising the brave skipper.
When the big moment came, a bottle of champagne was released from the roof of a compound building and ran down to a wire, smashing itself on the boat.